Assimilation is a Myth
Mamdani's map proves it. Or you could just ask the kids...
Recently, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani published a map of New York City’s extensive immigrant enclaves, highlighting thirty ethnic neighborhoods across NYC’s five boroughs.
The carveouts ranged from well-known ethnic neighborhoods such as Chinatown and Koreatown (of which there are multiple) to new additions like “Little Egypt,” two “Little Africas,” and incredibly, three “Little Mexicos.”
Predictably, the backlash from conservatives was immediate.
Also predictably, it completely missed the mark.
The outrage was not over the fact that New York City has been transformed from America’s premier city to a balkanized patchwork of ethnic enclaves representing every third-world country you can imagine.
No.
Their ire was because the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs decided to leave off “traditional” ethnic enclaves such as Little Italy.
Sigh.
Welcome to America in 2026, where Italian-Americans battle a Ugandan-born mayor for the historic claim to New Amsterdam and the English colony that succeeded it.
The truth is, we should not be fighting for a third-world-minded mayor’s recognition of Little Italy, of which few Italians remain.
Instead, we should be fighting for, as Teddy Roosevelt did, American cities that are completely devoid of “Hyphenated-Americanism.”
Arguing that your preferred ethnic enclave be recognized on Mamdani’s map, conservatives are unknowingly accepting the left’s multicultural framing.
This thinking not only needs to be thoroughly rejected, but the underlying mechanisms that brought us to a map of thirty ethnic enclaves need to be reversed.
The Great Lie
Mamdani’s map thus illustrates the great lie of mass migration—what Stephen Miller has called importing entire societies, not individuals.
The statistics bear this out. Officially, nearly 40% of NYC residents are foreign-born, up from 18% in 1970, demonstrating that an entirely new population has been imported into America’s largest city.
It is with this in mind that the deeper, and more civilizational threat from Mamdani’s map materializes. These enclaves, which are exponentially expanding, show that immigrants, especially in the modern sense, do not assimilate.
Instead, they balkanize existing territory into ever-expanding ethnic enclaves. Then their foreign-born leaders celebrate it as a good thing during “National Immigrant Heritage Month,” which of course is a month that never ends.
As Miller put it, “At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
His point is not about the morality or worth of individual immigrants, but rather the larger structural reality of modern immigration.
This is why assimilation, especially in the modern context, is a myth.
Ask the Kids
Now, there is someone out there who reads that last sentence and resorts to a personal anecdote to counter this assertion. It typically goes something like this:
“My neighbor is an immigrant and they love America.” Or “My great-great grandfather arrived in this country with nothing, worked hard, and became a model American,” or “my landscapers are awesome.”
While that’s certainly nice to hear, these statements completely miss both the moment, and the SCALE, of non-assimilation in America.
And so, I’ll meet these anecdotes with one of my own that demonstrates the exponential problem with mass immigration in our modern times.
My parents, now retired, were public school teachers in an area that is estimated to be 60% foreign-born in a school district with a 95% Hispanic student body.
These schools were located just outside New York City, within walking distance of the Hudson River.
Every year, as schools approached their long breaks, my parents would ask their students what their plans were for the extended time off.
Those who had immigrant parents would routinely say “I’m going back to my country.”
My parents would then ask, “Oh, were you born outside the United States?”
They’d respond, “No, I was born here.”
“So, this is your country then. You were born here,” my parents would respond.
The students would laugh at the assertion. What was so hard for these silly teachers to understand?
But to them there was no confusion.
“Their country” was not America. Their “home” was where their family came from.
This is what is happening on a massive scale in similar immigrant-concentrated school districts across the country.
Year after year, classrooms full of immigrant and first-generation American students are demonstrating that their true “home” is not America.
This lack of full cultural assimilation, especially in the modern context, is not attacking the “character” of immigrants.
It’s an objective reality of modern mass immigration.
How It Used to Work
Contrary to America’s past, there are NO mechanisms in place to facilitate assimilation. In fact, the celebration of multiculturalism demands the opposite.
Historical assimilation, to the extent that it did work, wasn’t automatic.
It was forcibly manufactured.
Companies like Ford had an “Americanization Program“ and offered a high wage of $5 a day, but workers had to undergo surprise inspections at their homes by Ford’s “Sociological Department.” Inspectors would show up unannounced at workers’ homes to ensure they were speaking English, eating “American” food, and maintaining middle-class American hygiene. If they continued to keep their old cultural habits, they were eventually fired.
Additionally, some states passed legislation that prohibited the teaching of foreign languages to young children. 37 states even passed laws making English the official language of the state during this push for Americanization.
Then, immigration was severely restricted for around 40 years from 1924 to 1965 – that is until the Hart-Celler Act reopened the immigration floodgates.
This gave existing immigrant populations time to assimilate into what was then a dominant American culture without it being further diluted by constant new arrivals.
None of those mechanisms exist today, and so we get cities like New York that are completely balkanized and led by the likes of Zohran Mamdani.
Objection, Overruled
I can hear the critics of these assertions now.
“Listen up, xenophobe. Studies routinely show that assimilation in modern America is happening at an equal or even faster pace than before!”
What these critics don’t acknowledge, either out of ignorance or deliberate malfeasance, is that these studies rely on the early 1900s (and late 1800s) model of the world prior to modern forms of mass communication and travel that have helped to keep immigrants thoroughly connected to their homelands.
Additionally, the studies pertain to the Ellis Island wave of immigrants, and by extension, their descendants who, as we have discussed, experienced more direct forms of coercive assimilation measures.
Lastly - and this is the immigration enthusiast’s sleight of hand—the definition of assimilation has changed dramatically from the traditional understanding of the American melting pot—which was long ago deemed racist.
Today, assimilation now simply means ethnic and economic coexistence.
And so, if an immigrant speaks passable English, has a job, pays taxes, and goes to school, that is now considered full “assimilation.” They’re just as American as George Washington.
It says nothing about whether that immigrant is culturally American - which is of course discouraged at every level of society because “diversity is our strength.”
Thankfully there is new research that is beginning to dismantle the official narrative, showing that assimilation is, in reality, regressing.
In this peer-reviewed study published in Social Sciences, researchers found a “resurgent ethnicity” among immigrants who arrived as children.
Unsurprisingly to anyone outside the church of diversity, these children were more likely than their parents to live in ethnic enclaves - and these were often more affluent areas outside metropolitan areas, called “ethnoburbs,” not just self-segregated enclaves within the confines of a city.
A few points worth highlighting from the study:
Kids who grow up in modern America are more likely than their first-generation immigrant parents to live in self-segregated enclaves.
But what about financial success? Sure, poor immigrants might cluster together but as their economic success increases, they will integrate more, correct?
Nope. Increased family income is associated with a higher propensity to cluster in ethnic areas, completely upending the old melting-pot theory. These upwardly mobile, educated immigrants are not dispersing into the mainstream; instead, they are using their financial success to fund and buy into affluent “ethnoburbs”.
In short, this balkanization is driven by a deliberate cultural choice to live apart from everyone else.
By the way, we didn’t need an official study to show this.
The 90-foot statue of the Hindu deity, Hanuman, towering over Fort Bend County, Texas and the proposed Muslim-centered EPIC city designed to operate like a nation within a nation should have sufficed.
Want more? How about the High school graduations that are conducted entirely in Spanish, the city governments flying Palestinian flags above their halls, and growing crowds of Mexican flag waving immigrant protestors calling for an end to federal immigration enforcement?
To the proponents of mass immigration, these are, no doubt, symbols of America’s diverse “strength.”
To everyone else, these are signs of civilizational collapse, or, at the very least, demonstrate that America is losing its sense of self.
And so, we circle back to Mamdani's map of our balkanized New York City.
Rather than pointing to a map that highlights how America's largest city is missing our preferred ethnic enclave, how about we strive to enact policies that will reverse the damage of Hart-Celler immigration and once again create a New York City full of unhyphenated-Americans?
The multiculturalists on both sides of the political spectrum will say no, of course.
But I’m not going to Fuhgettaboutit.
